How to calculate your site’s conversion rate.

Whether you’re wondering what a conversion rate is or you’re a marketing pro; this post covers the basics and offers some serious suggestions on how to boost sales from your website.

What’s the purpose of your website?

To look good, seem professional, have an online presence? All true but underneath all that, you’re hoping to impress visitors with your website wizardry and clever copy – so much so, that they run to buy from you.

You want visitors to turn into customers, you’re trying to convert them.

What’s a lead?

A lead is anyone interested or potentially interested in your product.

So what’s a conversion?

A conversion is any action you define; it could be a phone call or enquiry, newsletter sign-up, downloading something, spending a certain amount of time on the site or indeed, a sale.

Your conversation rate is a metric that helps you understand how well your website is performing month in, month out.

Why do I need to know my conversion rate?

Any activity your business makes to win sales should be measured and knowing your conversion rates (online and offline) is the first step to understanding how well your sales funnel is performing (and where you need to improve).

You can also base your future marketing efforts and the likely ROI (Return on Investment) from your conversion rate.

How do I calculate it?

For the sake of this example, let’s say your website objective was to sell a physical product:

Conversion Rate = Total number of sales / number of unique visitors to your site x 100

(E.g. 10 sales / 1000 unique visitors x 100 = 1% conversion rate.

Which means that 1% of your website visitors buy from you)

So in an offline version:

Conversion Rate = Total number of sales / number of leads from a particular source x 100

I want more results from my website, what should I do?

B: Increase the chances that a visitor will buy or complete the desired action when they visit your site

Increasing the number of visitors to your site can be costly; it’s a marketing effort and when you stop making the effort, the visitors might stop too.

Or, by making an investment in some changes to your website you can increase the chances of a visitor making the desired action.

Here at Mold, we design sites with a marketing mindset; every page is carefully laid out to maximize your conversion rate. We know that beauty isn’t everything (although we’re good at that too); you need brains behind the beauty!

Our web designers are experts in User Experience, combining on trend design with easy to use interfaces.

How do I know how many visitors are coming to my site?

Every website should have Google Analytics, if you haven’t done that yet; do it now.

If you already have Google Analytics setup:

Login to your Google Analytics Dashboard

Go to Audience > Overview

Choose your date range on the top right (go by week or month, but stick to whichever you choose)

See ‘Users’ (this is the number of ‘unique visitors’)

See the blue & green graph on the right hand side to differentiate between new unique visitors or returning unique visitors (if you wish to).

So now in any given month you know how many unique visitors you’ve had and you’ll know how many sign-ups or sales (or other defined action) you’ve had in that month = ta-da! Your conversion rate!

Bonus section

8 tips to improve your conversion rate now

1. Use A/B testing i.e. two versions of something to see which performs better. Using different layouts, styles, or pop up boxes to give you an idea of what works better. Clever marketers are always A/B testing new things.

2. Clearly demonstrate your value proposition; the main reason someone would buy from you (and not your competition).

3. Create a funnel; in some cases people are just not ready to buy from you straight away, maybe your product needs a more ‘solution selling’ approach, a personal touch. In this instance your website wants to be collecting newsletter sign-ups or call-back details, not trying to close a sale.

4. Get rid of the complicated business language; forget the fancy phrases and stick to clear, concise and understandable wording.

5. Deal with objections head on; make a list of common concerns you hear when selling your product and try to address them in your website copy.

6. Create trust;

a. Highlight your expertise

b. Show off your achievements,

c. Let them ‘meet the team’,

d. Make it easy to contact you,

e. Keep your content fresh and up to date

f. Avoid typos and broken links

g. List your physical address

7. Make it easy to buy; you’d be surprised how many people don’t think about this as part of their site design. No one likes to click through 5 pages or have to fill out too much information to check out. (Also, consider free shipping; it’s a proven motivator)

8. Prove it to them; testimonials, reviews, studies and statistics, social proof.

You might feel overwhelmed with information, or worried about how to implement some of these tactics; take advantage of a free consultation from our team so that we can help you review your current site, and consider some clever ways to improve without breaking the bank.